1917
1916 1917 1918 Events * City of New Orleans closes Storeyville. Jazz musicians flee to Kansas City and Chicago. * 10% of French casualties during this penultimate year of the First World War. * 83 African-American veterans of the First World War are lynched. * Miguel Almereyda (Bonaventure Vigo) dies. * Latvian Peter Ivanovich Stuchka becomes People's Commissar for Justice. * U.S. Marines continue the nineteen year long occupation of Haiti, from 1915-1934. Timeline January * January 16: Zimmermann Telgram is sent. * January 17: Zimmerman Telegram is intercepted. * January 31: Germany announces it will conduct indiscriminate submarine warfare against American and other neutral shippping supplying Britain. March * March: British troops enter Baghdad. * March 8: Senate adopts Rule 22: allowing permitting a vote of cloture on petition of 16 Senators and the termination of debate on a vote of two-thirds of the Senators present and voting. From 1808 until 1917 debate could not be closed off. The rule was changed again in 1975 to allow closing debate on a vote of three-fourths of all Senators. * March 15: Tsar Nicholas II abdicates. * March 27: V.I. Lenin, Krupshaya Lenin, Grigori Zinoviev and Mikha Tskhakaya board the Sealed Train. April * April 3: Sealed Train stops at Beloostov Station on the Russo-Finnish border. * April 6: U.S. Senate votes to enter the First World War 82 to 6; U.S. House of Representatives votes to enter the First World War 373 to 50. * April 18: Russian Foreign Minister Pavel Milyukov blunders when he issues diplomatic note to British and French governments announcing the intention of the Russian Provisional Government to annex territories of the Ottoman Empire. Russian public opinion swings against him and his government because of disgust at the idea of more imperialist war. May * May 4: Leon Trotsky arrives in Petrograd from the U.S. * May 19: Selective Service Act, a.k.a. consscription, a.k.a. the draft, signed by Pres. Woodrow Wilson. Draftees are called "selectees" by the tame patriotic press. * May 29: John F. Kennedy is born in Brookline, Massachusetts to Joe and Rose Kennedy (Fitzgerald). June * June: Serbian Intelligence chief and leader in the "Black Hand," D. Dimitrijevic, is executed. * June 4: Polish National Army established. July * July: 1,200 IWW strikers in Bisbee, Arizona are arrested, herded onto railroad cars, and dumped in the desert. * July 4: 400,000 workers and sailors roam the streets of anarchic revolutionary Petrograd. August * August 1: Labor organizer and anti-war activist Frank Little is kidnapped by thugs in Butte, Montana an lynched from a railroad trestle. * August 18: Caspar Weinberger is born in San Francisco. September * September: Russian Provisional Government tries Russian General V.A. Sukhomlinov. Condemned to life imprisonment at hard labor. October * October 17: Battle of Caporetto begins. * October 25: Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets meets at the Smolnyi. * October 31: British government agrees to issue the Balfour Declaration. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sends letter to Lord Lionel Rothschild pledging Britain to establish a "national home" for the Jews in Palestine. November * November 1: Sale of alcoholic beverages is prohibted in Washington, DC under the Sheppard Act: 269 legal retail liquor stores close and bars are closed. * November 2: Public announcement of the Balfour Declaration. Delayed since October 31 so as not to endanger Allenby's miltiary campaign against the Turkish Army in Palestine. * November 17: Helen Suzman (a.k.a. Helen Gavronsky) is born in South Africa. December * December: British colonial rule begins in Palestine. * December: French Radical-Socialist Joseph Caillaux is arrested on charges of dealing with the enemy. * December 16: Arthur C. Clarke is born. Category: Year